Huge tornado levels Oklahoma City suburb in U.S., killing dozens

A massive tornado up to a mile wide chewed through Moore, Oklahoma, a U.S. suburb of Oklahoma City, on Monday afternoon, grinding up entire neighborhoods and obliterating a school where third-graders who had huddled in a hallway were buried in rubble.

Many of those children were pulled — wet and dirty but alive — from the shredded school. As darkness fell Monday, first responders continued to pick through the wreckage looking for children who might be trapped.

The Oklahoma state medical examiner’s office said Monday evening that 91 people had been confirmed killed, but the death toll was quickly rising. At least 20 children had been killed, most of them under 12, Amy Elliott, of the state medical examiner’s office, told news agency AFP. CNN reported that at least 145 people had been hospitalized.

Reporters for local broadcaster KFOR-TV saw children as young as 9 being pulled out of the Plaza Towers Elementary School in Moore, a residential community of 55,000.

Anxious parents were being kept at a distance while search-and-rescue workers scrambled to free the students.

A second elementary school, Briarwood, was also hit but did not appear to have sustained casualties.

Helicopter footage showed a wide path of near-total destruction in a community that had endured a similarly powerful twister 14 years ago.

U.S. President Barack Obama declared a “major disaster” in the state and ordered federal aid to supplement local recovery efforts.

On the Enhanced Fujita damage scale of tornadoes, this was probably a 4 or 5, at the highest ends of violence, with winds reaching 200 miles per hour, said Russell Schneider, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla., about eight miles from the path of the storm.

“It’s a very wide swath of very intense damage, a large number of structures almost totally destroyed,” Schneider said. “That in and of itself is usually indicative of a violent tornado, EF4 or EF5.”

Plaza Towers Elementary School, where scores of students took shelter as the twister approached, was completely destroyed. Nearby, cars and trucks were heaped on top of one another and homes were reduced to foundations covered with splintered wood.

“I’m sick to my stomach,” said Jayme Shelton, a spokesman for the city of Moore, reached by telephone. “Send your prayers this way.”

Shelton said the city’s roughly 160 police officers and firefighters were going door-to-door, checking for people who might be trapped in the rubble. Search-and-rescue teams poured in from every corner of the state.

“This is terrible. This is war-zone terrible,” said a helicopter reporter for KFOR-TV Channel 4 in Oklahoma City. “This school is completely gone. … This whole area is destroyed. The houses are destroyed, completely leveled.”

The tornado outbreak was part of an explosion of violent weather that slashed the nation’s midsection, inciting severe-weather alerts from Texas to Michigan. The atmospheric conditions include a powerful weather system from the west colliding with warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico, a perfect recipe for tornadoes and super-cell thunderstorms, Schneider said. The bad weather will migrate to the east Tuesday.

The Storm Prediction Center counted nine tornadoes Monday in Oklahoma, Texas and Kansas, though that was a preliminary number based on eyewitness reports. Although much of that region of the country is rural, one monster cell ground its way directly through the southern suburbs of the Oklahoma City metropolis — an urban hit that brought to mind the Tuscaloosa, Ala., tornado of April 27, 2011 (64 dead), and the Joplin, Mo., tornado of May 22 of the same year (160 dead).

The strength of the big tornado that hit Moore will be determined in coming days after closer scrutiny of the damage. The twister was on the ground for 40 minutes, ravaging a 20-mile path, Schneider said.

“This was a very unfortunate path for this powerful storm,” he said. He noted that the likelihood of severe weather and tornadoes had been forecast many days in advance and that tornado watches had preceded the twister. But this was so powerful a storm, with such devastating winds, that people needed to be in basements or, better yet, a storm shelter, to be safe.

“You really need to be below ground,” Schneider said.

The citizens there had seen this kind of thing before, on May 3, 1999, when 44 people were killed by a tornado that struck Moore, Newcastle, Del City, Stroud and other suburbs. That tornado reportedly spawned winds that reached 318 mph, the highest ever scientifically recorded, according to a 2005 story in USA Today.

“It’s as bad as it looks,” Rep. James Lankford, R-Okla., whose district includes most of neighboring Oklahoma City, said Monday evening as he left the House floor, checking his phone for updates.

The House will pause Tuesday for a moment of silence. Monday night, Obama spoke with Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin to share his concern and assure her that the administration is ready to assist the state’s emergency responders.

The injured were brought to multiple hospitals in the area, including 20 people, eight of them children, to Oklahoma University Medical Center, said spokesman Scott Coppenbarger.

About 60 patients were taken to Norman Regional Hospital and Norman HealthPlex Hospital, said Kelly Wells, spokeswoman for Norman Regional Health Care. She described the injuries as “a lot of trauma, a lot of lacerations, a lot of broken bones. Typical tornado injuries. We’re no stranger to this out here.”

The two hospitals also received more than 30 patients from Moore Medical Center, the third hospital in Normal Regional’s network, which was destroyed by the tornado, Wells said.

By Monday evening, a Facebook page created to help connect survivors with loved ones had a growing number of posts, most from people searching for the missing.